David Creelman

I had a strange experience at an analytics workshop I ran last year. I’d set up an “open space” session where I had six or seven flip charts scattered around the room and participants could write down a topic they’d like to discuss. Normally, you end up with little groups at each flip chart with...

Here’s the sad truth:
The demand for HR reporting is insatiable.
Accurate HR reporting is vastly harder than managers think it is.
Most HR reports add little or no value.
Let me underline that last point of “little or no value.” A manager at one of my workshops shared a story: An employee doing HR...

You come to a fork in the road. The sign indicates 100 travelers have taken the left fork and 14 have fallen to their death; it also shows that 50 travelers have taken the right fork and 8 have fallen to their death. Which road do you take?
Welcome to the world of HR analytics.
The answer to...

A police chief says, “Gather evidence so we can find out who’s guilty,” not “Gather evidence to show this person is guilty.” HR analysts should be so lucky. Too often we’re asked to provide evidence that someone’s initiative has increased productivity, or that an investment in this department will...

Recently thought leaders have been promoting the idea that HR should learn from marketing and embrace concepts like “employee experience.” What would happen if a CEO took these ideas seriously? We can find answers in a book I wrote with Peter Navin, The CMO of People: Manage employees like...

Often when I talk to companies about analytics they end up just talking about building dashboards. This is not a small thing because dashboards are expensive and can easily eat up most of your analytics resources. It’s also not a simple thing because dashboards are steeped in confusion and stirred...